Wednesday, March 15, 2017

For your St. Patrick’s Day viewing pleasure

There are certain movies that I just have to dig out in March when my non-existent Irish heritage needs a little boost. There’s “The Quiet Man,” of course. That’s a perennial. There’s “The Secret of Roan Inish,” which is mostly for children but I still find it charming. (And for the life of me I can’t seem to find out what became of Jeni Courtney after she grew up. Jeni, if you ever google yourself and see this, please leave a comment.) I tried to like “The Luck of the Irish,” I truly did, but the acting was so wooden not even the irrepressible Cecil Kellaway could save it. There’s the Neil Jordan/Liam Neeson biopic “Michael Collins.” And then there’s “I See a Dark Stranger,” far and away my favorite.

The clip I uploaded so many years ago here is gone, but sure, isn’t the whole darn film on YouTube now, and therefore also at On The Other Foot?

Deborah played a "little slip of a girleen" from the west of Ireland who tries to join the IRA, finds she's about twenty years out of date, and instead winds up spying for the Germans. The film was okay in and of itself, but it would have been just another late-night British relic except for her. She took a rather generic role and made the young lady into the sort of beautiful, innocently sexy, and self-contradictory creature that so many girls that age really are. When she turned up her nose at Trevor Howard, you could see her looking at him out the corner of her eye. When she declaimed her principles (mostly an inchoate hatred of Cromwell), she sounded just like a thousand other young women who throw themselves so passionately into their causes, never dreaming that they're not alone in them. She wasn't a part in a script, she was a real girl, and the kind that makes you tear your hair out and champ at the bit by turns. She might as well have been sitting next to me, rather than on screen, she was so thoroughly real. I was smitten with her by the third scene.

Speaking of Trevor Howard, he's excellent here too, at his understated best. William O’Gorman is fun as Bridie’s inebriated little father with tall tales of heroism. I do have to close my ears when a crowd of British extras shows up pretending to be American, but that’s a picky. And the dialogue has some lovely dry wit: